Mojang has announced plans to launch collectible card game Scrolls on PC next month. It will initially be sold as a beta at a discounted rate, a strategy Mojang also employed for its previous game, the wildly successful Minecraft, which debuted for €10 before the price rose to €15 as it became more feature complete and eventually €20.
Mojang co-founder and game designer Jakob Porser told Polygon: "We are aiming for release at the end of April and it's looking pretty good. We've been wanting to release it for a while because we want to have the same sort of development as Minecraft. We'll release it early at a discount. With the help from our community, we'll take the game to the next level and see what we want to do and what they expect out of the game and you can work around that."
Porser said the game will launch with multiple modes, including what he hopes will be a "rich single player experience". And while there’s talk of supporting microtransactions for avatar customisation or deep statistical tracking features, he added: "The core gameplay experience we want to keep as far away from monetization as possible." Mojang plans to launch Scrolls on Mac at a later date and is also exploring a potential Linux release.
Porser also reacted to Blizzard’s recent announcement of free-to-play trading card game Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, noting: "This could potentially be something that could broaden the market. Also, if Blizzard believes in this genre then maybe we're moving in the right direction. In the end the consumer gets multiple choices and we have to step our game to try and make the best possible product, the best possible game we can. If Blizzard makes the better game, then all credit to them and we need to move on to something else."
